A Strange Soundtrack for Your Body's Ears

Tuesday, October 21st, 2014

Posted byJim Healy

This essay on the music featured in Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani's The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears was written by UW Cinematheque Programmer and Chief Projectionist, Mike King. The Strange Color will have its only Madison-area theatrical screening on Friday, October 24 at 7p.m. in the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall.

A Strange Soundtrack for Your Body's Ears

By Mike King

Belgian directing team Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani craft modern giallos with unbelievably vivid textural detail. Their hallucinatory new film, The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears, is riddled with cinephilic allusions, yet wholly original. Though clearly indebted to films of the past, the only thing Cattet and Forzani actually copy verbatim is music: much of the soundtrack is directly lifted from the 1970s cinema that inspires them.

Of course, films have been repurposing each others’ music since the studio era, with examples ranging from sly commentary, as when characters in William Wellman’s hardscrabble Depression portrait Wild Boys of the Road ironically whistle “We’re in the Money” from Warner’s contemporaneous Gold Diggers of 1933, to the simply bewildering, as when “Over the Rainbow” appears as a refrain in the seedy 1941 noir I Wake Up Screaming (a title, incidentally, that would fit The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears like a black leather glove). In recent years, Quentin Tarantino has become the king of this kind of sonic appropriation, curating Billboard-charting soundtracks that crib from blaxploitation movies and Ennio Morricone scores. Tarantino traffics in deep cuts, but the more well known the source, the murkier the line between homage and theft—in 2012, Kim Novak cried foul when The Artist swiped Bernard Herrmann’s iconic Vertigo theme.

Like Tarantino, Cattet and Forzani have enviable record collections, and playing DJ is an inextricable part of their creative process. The duo assembles their soundtrack as they write; music selections are even indicated in the script, so the uncanny fusion of sound and image is embedded from the film’s earliest stages. In an interview with Electric Sheep, Cattet reveals that “music inspires the way a sequence develops. It gives us a rhythm, and ideas too… all of a sudden, there’s one track that strikes us, so we play it again and again.” For Cattet and Forzani, old giallo scores become muses for the film itself: crate-digging is symbiotic with screenwriting.

Given their subject matter, naturally Cattet and Forzani use a couple of Ennio Morricone cues (his music appeared in their previous giallo, Amer, as well), including this chilling number, originally from The Short Night of the Glass Dolls:

Forzani cited the following Morricone composition from Maddalena as “the most important music” in The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears. The breathy vocals accompany one of the film’s most spellbinding sequences.

A few of Strange Color’s non-Morricone pieces exist online, as well. Originally composed for a 1970 Italian take on The Picture of Dorian Gray (directed by erstwhile Sergio Leone cinematographer Massimo Dallmano), Giuseppe de Luca’s “Rito a Los Angeles” was also used by Steven Soderbergh for a sequence in Ocean’s Twelve.

Cattet and Forzani’s incomparably broad knowledge of exploitation sounds extends even to Italian ripoffs of softcore’s deathless Emmanuelle series. Nico Fidenco’s “My Boundless” is one of the film’s most memorable cuts.

Just as every other aspect of the film is endlessly revised in the transition from script to screen, not all the music Cattet and Forzani had in mind made it to the final cut. Cattet cites the theme for Seven Blood-Stained Orchids as “the very first piece we thought of for our film, and it inspired the first drafts.” Even though it no longer appears in the film, its status as a key inspiration merits inclusion here - consider it a bonus track.

JUST ADDED: BENEFIT SCREENING OF NEW GODARD 3D MOVIE, 'GOODBYE TO LANGUAGE'

Monday, October 20th, 2014

Posted byJim Healy

November 13, 3:30 p.m., UPDATE: Online ticket sales for this event have ended. A very limited number of tickets will be available at the will call table in the Point Cinema lobby beginning at 6 p.m. tonight. Tickets are $20, cash only.

The UW Cinematheque is proud to announce the only Madison-area screening of the latest feature from cinema legend Jean-Luc Godard, Goodbye to Language (Adieu au langage), the director’s first feature-length project in 3D. The 3D benefit screening will take place on Thursday, November 13, at 7 p.m., at the Marcus Point Cinema, 7825 Big Sky Drive, in Madison. Tickets for this screening are $20 and proceeds will benefit the UW Cinematheque’s efforts to bring digital 3D projection to our regular screening venue, 4070 Vilas Hall.

Half a century after igniting the French New Wave with his revolutionary Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard has produced his first 3D feature, a mind-blowing fusion of art and technology that seems beamed in from a future era of moviemaking. One of cinema’s true visionaries, Godard applies his relentless creativity to 3D, using custom-made camera rigs to conjure breathtaking, eye-bending effects like you’ve never seen before, and that absolutely must be experienced on the big screen. A magisterial meditation on philosophy, infinity, and the auteur’s own pet dog, Goodbye to Language is as dazzling and invigorating as anything in Godard's legendary filmography. Far and away one of the most acclaimed films of the year, Goodbye to Language won the Jury Prize at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, where New York Times critic Manohla Dargis called it a “thrilling cinematic experience that nearly levitated the theater.”

The UW Cinematheque presents the Wisconsin premiere of this awe-inspiring achievement; as an added bonus, our 3D screening will be introduced by UW Madison’s Jacques Ledoux Professor of Film Studies Emeritus David Bordwell, who has declared Goodbye to Language “the best new film I’ve seen this year, and the best 3D film I’ve ever seen.” Professor Bordwell will also lead a post-screening discussion with the audience.

The benefit screening of Goodbye to Language will screen on Thursday, November 13, 7 p.m. at:

November 13, 3:30 p.m., UPDATE: Online ticket sales for this event have ended. A very limited number of tickets will be available at the will call table in the Point Cinema lobby beginning at 6 p.m. tonight. Tickets are $20, cash only.

THE TROUBLE WITH HARRY: Hitchcock's Surrealist Romance

Friday, October 17th, 2014

Posted byJim Healy

By Amanda McQueen, UW Cinematheque Programmer and Project Assistant

The Trouble With Harry is a bit of an outlier in Alfred Hitchcock's oeuvre. Though ostensibly about the discovery of a dead body, the film is really a droll - if somewhat macabre - romantic comedy, lacking in the suspense typically associated with the director's most celebrated works. Harry was also a commercial failure upon its release in 1955, and this seems to have played a role in the comparative lack of attention the film has received. In more recent years, however, critics have started to reevaluate the film, and rightly so.

Based on a 1949 novella by English writer Trevor Jack Story, The Trouble with Harry tells of a group of townspeople who find a corpse in the woods - that of the titular Harry. Each believing they are in some way responsible for Harry's death, they conspire to hide the body until a solution can be reached. In the midst of the discussions of mortality and murder that ensue, love blossoms and couples are formed. Paramount considered adapting the novella in 1950, but thought the scenario too whimsical and unworldly for an effective screen translation. The story's understated dark humor and romance appealed to Hitchcock, however, and he bought the rights - anonymously, in order to ensure a low price. Hitchcock had a multiple picture deal with Paramount at the time, and though the studio was still skeptical about the property's commercial potential, they were willing to bet on the director's reputation and put up a budget of $1 million.

To write the film, Hitchcock selected his favored screenwriter of the moment, John Michael Hayes. Hayes had just finished Rear Window (1954) and To Catch a Thief (1955), to much acclaim, and would follow up Harry with the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956). (But a disagreement over screen credit on Man severed Hayes' personal and professional relationship with Hitchcock permanently). Hayes' penchant for character development and sharp dialogue made him a good fit for Harry, which is peopled with quipping eccentrics. Moreover, Hitchcock had decided to set the film in a small town in New England in the fall, and this appealed to Hayes, who had grown up in that part of the country. To ensure the authenticity of the desired autumnal foliage, locations were selected in Craftsbury and Morrisville, Vermont, and though Hitchcock wanted to shoot the entire film there - setting up a make-shift sound stage in the American Legion building in Morrisville - uncooperative weather drove the crew back to California, bags of real Vermont leaves in hand.

Upon its release in October of 1955, Harry received mixed reviews; some critics found it slow and strained, others thought it sophisticated and funny. Though it performed decently overseas, it was a flop in America and ultimately did not recoup its costs. At first glance, we might understand why. Harry has no big-name stars and no pre-sold story; it had only Hitchcock's name to market it. And this might not have been a problem, had Harry been something more typical of the Master of Suspense. But as film critic Peter Bradshaw hypothesizes, while audiences expected Agatha Christie, Hitchcock gave them Waiting for Godot.

Aesthetically speaking, The Trouble with Harry has a great deal to recommend it. It features lush VistaVision cinematography by long-term Hitchcock collaborator Robert Burks; solid editing from Paramount veteran Alma Macrorie (nominated for an Oscar for her work on The Bridges at Toko-Ri [1954]); and a jaunty, ostinato-based musical score from Bernard Herrmann. This was the first of seven soundtracks Herrmann did for Hitchcock over the course of their 11-year relationship, and it remained the director's favorite. Harry is also well cast, making good use of stalwart character actors Mildred Natwick, Mildred Dunnock, and Edmund Gwenn, and featuring an early performance from Jerry Mathers - two years before he would become beloved throughout America as Theodore "The Beaver" Cleaver. Most notably, though, Harry also marks the screen debut of Shirley MacLaine, who was reportedly cast after associate producer Herbert Coleman and unit production manager Doc Erickson took a break from location scouting to see The Pajama Game on Broadway. As luck would have it, dancer Carol Haney was out sick, and MacLaine, her understudy, was on that night.

It is ultimately the film's tone, however, that has really started to attract some critics back to The Trouble with Harry, ironically, since it was tone that deterred Paramount from adapting Story's novella in the first place and it was the tone that seemed most off-putting to contemporary reviewers and audiences. Harry is fairly frank in its discussion of death and sex - at least by 1955 standards. Certain concessions had to be made to the Production Code Administration, of course, to ensure the film's release: for example, Jennifer's son is illegitimate in the novella but not so in the film, and the film eliminates the novella's rather perverse scene where Harry offers to make love to Jennifer while pretending to be Robert - his dead brother and Jennifer's former lover. Nevertheless, double entendres and allusions abound, and there are explicit discussions about nude portraits and the scandalous double bed. More noteworthy, however, is the way characters discuss their love lives and their potential for murder with the same nonchalance and practicality. Death and sex are completely intertwined in the film and neither seems to be cause for much fuss. Harry's fictional town of Highwater, Vermont thus comes across like a strange dreamscape, populated with witty sleepwalkers. Indeed, it is this eerie, somnambulistic detachment of the characters - their muted responses to things that should be shocking or upsetting - that has sparked comparisons between Harry and surrealist works like Luis Bunuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972).

The Trouble with Harry has been called a pastoral comedy, a fairy tale, and an experiment in "radical, absurdist cinema." However you want to characterize it, it is certainly an unusual, perhaps even dream-like, but ultimately delightful experience. It is also an experience that Hitchcock stood resolutely by. The director blamed his "enemies" – the distributor and exhibitors – for the film's financial failure, and though he was forced to admit that it ultimately proved to be "an expensive self-indulgence," he also insisted that The Trouble with Harry was one of his personal favorites.

A 35mm print of The Trouble with Harry will screen on Sunday, October 19 at 2 p.m. in the auditorium of the Chazen Museum of Art.

UW Cinematheque's Ben Reiser on DON'T LOOK NOW

Thursday, October 16th, 2014

Posted byJim Healy

DON'T READ NOW

By Ben Reiser, UW Cinematheque Programmer and Accounts Manager

(There are some mild spoilers below, but if you want to experience this film the way it should be experienced, maybe wait ‘til after you’ve seen it…)

I first saw Don't Look Now on the tail end of a double bill with Rosemary’s Baby at Cinema Village in NYC when I was 14. My friend Steve and I had gone (and gotten some adult to buy us tickets to this R rated double bill) to see Rosemary’s Baby which I had seen parts of on TV. We didn’t know anything about Don’t Look Now, and weren’t really even planning on staying for all of it, unless it really grabbed us.

Well, by the end of the first scene it had indeed grabbed us. By the end of the movie I was a wreck, the wind knocked out of me, unable to get up from my seat or say anything to Steve. That’s only happened to me two other times at the movies (I saw Halloween in 1978 when I was 12, that was also the only time I’ve ever actually hid under a seat, and later, in 1988, I was unable to move for a good five minutes after the ending of The Vanishing).

Don’t Look Now immediately became one of the cornerstones in my lifelong love of scary movies. I’ve since seen it, talked about it, recommended it, thought about it, argued about it, and dreamt about it so many times I feel like I’m too close to it now to be able to say or write anything about it, but I’ll try.

To prepare myself I finally scouted out a copy of Daphne Du Maurier’s original short story of the same name to see just how much of the DNA of this film is Du Maurier’s and how much is Nicolas Roeg’s (and screenwriters Allan Scott and Chris Bryant). What I discovered is that the film is surprisingly faithful to the short story in terms of it’s plotting, but the overall tone is different and there are some rather important cinematic embellishments and differences in terms of character and theme:

First, the title. I’ve always wondered what, if anything, it signified. Ultimately I decided it was meant as a cautionary flag for the audience, and that at a certain point towards the end of the film, it was best to look away. Perhaps it should have popped up as an onscreen warning along the lines of the countdown clock that allowed viewers a chance to retreat to the "Coward's Corner" before the ending of William Castle's Homicidal (1961), or the infamous countdown before the climax of Gaspar Noe's I Stand Alone (1998), but in Du Maurier's short story, which for most of its length is more of a comedy of manners, the most likely refers to the main character (John Baxter)’s humorous attempts to keep his wife from seeing a pair of sisters (twins in the short story) who claim to have a psychic bond with the couple’s dead daughter. The humorous tone and mild satire of British class warfare in the short story is replaced by a more somber meditation on grief and on the dangers of misperception and miscommunication in the film adaptation.

Towards that end, Roeg makes even better use of Venice as the setting of the story than Du Maurier does, doubling down on the language and cultural barriers only hinted at in the original story. By making Baxter an American with a British wife rather than a fellow European, and as played by Donald Sutherland, Baxter conveys a different kind of entitled arrogance than that of the original story’s upper crust Brit. He’s even more a fish out of water and his struggles to understand and be understood are a constant source of unease. Venice in the film is not only a dank, shadowy maze that feels like a twisty, open air haunted house (every hotel and restaurant in the film is shuttered, closing down, covered with sheets, it’s the end of the tourist season and it feels like there will never be another one) it’s also a very foreign land, with strange customs and a language that for the characters in the film and most American viewers is a definite roadblock, an obstacle where important nuances are lost, never to be recovered.

Roeg adds a haunting prologue not found in the short story that firmly establishes a mood of dread and sorrow as well as introducing a number of recurring visual motifs: water, broken glass, the color red. These elements provide a roadmap that viewers will find difficult to decipher upon first viewing, and indeed it’s this wonderful “form mirroring content” that makes Don’t Look Now such a master class in filmmaking. The film sprinkles clues and hints throughout in a way that leads the audience to come to the same conclusions as the characters, right or (frequently) wrong. We never get a clearer picture of events than the characters do, but it’s done so expertly that we don’t register the manipulation. Through his use of unconventional editing and sound design, Roeg disorients us as viewers much as Baxter and his wife, Laura (a radiant yet haunted Julie Christie), are disoriented in the back alleys of Venice and adrift in their lives as they struggle to deal with the death of a child. The visceral cinematography tends to put us in the center of the action, and in a terrifying sequence, we are dangling by a thread, high above a hard floor after some broken scaffolding leaves Baxter hanging on for dear life. We as viewers are right there with him, fists clenched, hearts racing.

The film’s infamous sex scene is but a mere mention in the short story. Much has been made of this scene between Sutherland and Christie in the movie, it frequently ends up on lists of the top sex scenes in cinema history. Eschewing a linear trajectory, we see shots of the couple making love interspersed with shots of the two of them going through the routine motions of getting dressed, post-coitus, for dinner. There is a vérité quality to the lovemaking that is rarely seen in such scenes using movie stars, awkwardly angled body parts, and the fairly explicit indication of cunnilingus. Perhaps what caused such a stir is that this sex more than most onscreen sex resembles the way an actual married couple might commingle, with a knowledge of each other’s bodies – what works and what doesn’t.

And then of course there’s the ending. I’ve always thought that Don’t Look Now has one of the best shock-endings in the history of cinema, but perhaps that’s not an uncontested opinion. I mentioned this week’s screening to a longtime friend recently and he said something about how he could never get past the dumb ending. I couldn’t disagree more, but it’s true that for as much as I love it I always assumed that it was a Roeg revision, not part of the original story design. I was happily surprised to discover this week that the ending is Du Maurier’s completely. I think it’s perfect, and devastating, and unforgettable. The same can be said for the film as a whole.

A 35mm print of Don't Look Now will screen on Friday, October 17 at 7 p.m. in the CInematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall.

Belmondo: Cascadeur

Tuesday, October 14th, 2014

Posted byJim Healy

By Jim Healy, UW Cinematheque Director of Programming

In the U.S. today, Jean-Paul Belmondo is still recognized as an iconic superstar of international cinema, but American audiences of today might not be quite as aware of the incredible range of this legendary performer. Belmondo is now best known for his leading roles in the groundbreaking features of the French nouvelle vague, films like Godard's Breathless (1960), A Woman is a Woman (1961) and Pierrot le fou (1965), Melville's Leon Morin, Priest (1961) and Le Doulos (1963), Truffaut's Mississippi Mermaid (1969) and Resnais' Stavisky (1974). Thanks to enterprising independent American distributors like Rialto Pictures and The Film Desk and specialty home video labels like The Criterion Collection, most of these Belmondo titles have been kept in circulation for American art house theaters and on DVD/Blu-Ray. But these New Wave movies represent the more cerebral side of Belmondo's filmography and only a small fraction of his more than 60 feature film appearances.

In Europe, Belmondo is much better known as a light-hearted man-of-action. A former boxer with a memorable mug that has earned him comparisons with Humphrey Bogart, Belmondo made several dozen films in his native France during the 1960s, 70s and 80s that exploit his marvelous physicality and his willingness to do his own stunts. These movies - some straight-forward action thrillers, some comic spoofs - frequently found Belmondo pairing with one of a handful of French directors who knew best how to capture the charisma and antics of this unique star. The most notable of these directors include Henri Verneuil, Georges Lautner and Jacques Deray, and, in fact, several of their Belmondo vehicles, like Deray's Borsalino (1970) and Verneuil's The Burglars (1971) were originally given wide releases in American theaters. That neither of these popular films have been made available on DVD in the U.S. is indicative of the access most American viewers have to Belmondo's less-serious side.

The auteur who gave Belmondo his greatest exposure as an action superstar was Philippe de Broca (1933-2004). Belmondo and de Broca made five features together, beginning with the 1962 swashbuckler Cartouche and ending with 1975's L'incorrigible. Over the next two Saturdays, October 18 and 25, the Cinematheque will present new restorations of their second and third collaborations, the rollicking action-comedies That Man from Rio (1964) and Up to His Ears (1965). An only partial listing of Belmondo's activities in That Man from Rio alone include: driving a tractor across an airport runway, skydiving into a jungle swamp (where he has a showdown with a live alligator!), clinging to the side of an eight-story building and swinging, Tarzan-style, from a vine. But if that's not enough for ya, here's a montage of awe-inspiring moments from over a dozen different movies where Belmondo, in the tradition of Buster Keaton and Jackie Chan, risks life and limb for your entertainment. This compilation includes clips from Verneuil's The Burglars and The Night Caller (aka Fear Over the City, 1975), as well as de Broca's Le Magnifique (1973), three fun movies that we included in our Cinematheque's Belmondo retrospective during the summer of 2011.

Like Keaton and Chan, Belmondo suffered numerous injuries for his art, including fractured hands and legs. A heavy metal pulley struck him in the face during the making of Hold-Up in 1985 and Belmondo swore off doing his own stunts from that point on. A stroke in 2001 has kept him almost entirely off-screen for the last decade but he returned to take on the leading role in Un Homme et son chien, a remake of Vittorio De Sica's Umberto D, in 2008. While we anxiously await his return to cinema screens, a few efforts by American distributors have been made to remind us of Belmondo's range and extraordinary use of his physical instrument. In 2012, Olive Films released DVDs and Blu-Rays of two Belmondo vehicles from the 60s, Gerard Oury's jokey The Brain (1969) and Verneuil's Green in the Sun (1964). The latter film, a lighter knock-off of Clouzot's The Wages of Fear, concludes with a rollicking bare-knuckle brawl between Belmondo and Lino Ventura.

Now, the good folks at Cohen Film Collection are theatrically re-releasing That Man from Rio in honor of its 50th anniversary. That Man from Rio was conceived in order to cash in on the growing popularity of the James Bond franchise, but Sean Connery's got nothing on Belmondo when it comes to action scenes. The film proved so popular everywhere it played (especially in the U.S.) that Belmondo and de Broca immediately teamed up again for Up to His Ears the very next year. Cohen has made both films available in new 2K restorations. That Man from Rio screens Saturday, October 18 at 7 p.m. and Up to His Ears screens Saturday, October 25 at 7 p.m. Both screenings in 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Avenue.

Even More Hitchcock!

Friday, October 10th, 2014

Posted byJim Healy

by Amanda McQueen, UW Cinematheque Programmer and Project Assistant

Not only is Alfred Hitchcock one of cinema's most popular directors, he is also one of the most studied and analyzed. It has helped, of course, that he was prolific; with a career spanning about 55 years, there's no shortage of material for critics, scholars, and fans to delve into. In the early-1920s, after some time designing title cards for silent films, he graduated to work as an art director, writer, editor, and assistant director - sometimes performing all four roles on the same film. Between 1925 and 1976, he directed over 50 feature films, spanning the transition from silent to sound and working in both Britain and Hollywood. He also produced and directed a number of additional projects for television, mostly for his series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

When auteur theory arose in the 1950s and 1960s, Hitchcock was one of the first directors brought into the pantheon of great filmmakers. Since then, book upon book and article upon article have sought and analyzed the director's signatures - those elements of narrative, character, and style that seem to reveal his personal vision and that mark a film as definitively Hitchcockian. There's his preoccupation with blonde women, with doubles, and with false accusations and mistaken identity. There's his penchant for narrative twists, for favoring suspense over surprise, and for MacGuffins - those plot elements that turn out to be completely unimportant. And there's his interest in psychoanalysis, in sexuality, and in voyeurism.

Hitchcock films often explore the act of looking. Using camera movement, editing, and framing, Hitchcock is famous for putting the viewer in a voyeuristic position, but his films are also full of characters looking - watching each other and even breaking the forth wall to stare right at us. The Criterion Collection recently posted a wonderful, rather eerie video that speaks to this particular theme: "Eyes of Hitchcock."

But perhaps the most literal of Hitchcock's directorial signatures - and certainly the most fun - are his cameos. He makes a brief appearance in 39 out of his 52 surviving films, and spotting him has become a game for Hitchcock fans. (In my opinion, composer John Addison ruins the game in Torn Curtain by signaling the director's presence with the theme song from Alfred Hitchcock Presents). Indeed, the cameos were so popular, that audiences would become distracted searching for them and would not pay attention to the plot; so Hitchcock began putting his personal appearances into the first part of the film, to get them out of the way relatively quickly. Some of his cameos are tricky; there are times when he keeps his back to the camera or otherwise obscures himself from direct view. Many other cameos function as amusing gags, often unrelated to the plot, but providing moments of levity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Internet is full of supercuts putting together all of the director's cameos, from that in 1927's The Lodger through 1976's Family Plot. Can you spot him in all of the clips compiled here?

SeeHitchcock's 1956 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much on Sunday, October 12, 2 p.m. at the Chazen Museum of Art, part of our ongoing More Hitchcock! series.

The Slaprobatics of Denis Lavant

Thursday, October 9th, 2014

Posted byJim Healy

By Amanda McQueen, UW Cinematheque Programmer and Project Assistant

Denis Lavant is an incredibly physical actor. Though also known for his distinctive face - interesting, but not really classically handsome - Lavant has become associated with a markedly kinetic performance style. Slapstick, acrobatics, and dance are all within his wheelhouse, and Lavant has said that when approaching his roles, his body - not the text - is his first language. Taking inspiration from theater and street performing, where a particular intensity is needed to attract audiences, Lavant at times moves with an electrifying abandon that belies the control he is able to wield over his body. Those who work with Lavant - perhaps most notably director Leos Carax, who helped launch Lavant's career with Boy Meets Girl (1984) and who has featured the actor in most of his films - are often attracted to him because of his ability to shift from quiet to frenetic, from graceful to unrestrained. Carax, Lavant explains, "directs me more like a sculptor, physically."

Lavant's career is long and varied; though he describes himself as primarily a theater actor, he has done a great deal of work for film and television, appearing in shorts, features, and music videos. In 1998, for example, he starred in the award-winning video for "Rabbit in Your Headlights" from British electronic duo UNKLE (featuring vocals from Radiohead's Thom Yorke). The video relies primarily on Lavant's physicality; he stumbles erratically down a road, mumbling almost incoherently, and is repeatedly hit by passing cars. The payoff at the video's end, however, demonstrates just how powerful Lavant's body can be.

Some of Lavant's physical performances have become iconic. The pop culture website The Dissolve recently posted a list of "The Movies' 50 Greatest Pop Music Moments," and Lavant features twice. First, at #42, the celebrated final scene from Claire Denis' Beau Travail (1999), in which Lavant dances to Corona's "Rhythm of the Night." And then, at #41, is a scene from Carax's Mauvais Sang (1986), in which Lavant runs, leaps, and cartwheels down the street to David Bowie's "Modern Love."

In a 2008 interview, Lavant said: "Maybe I am more physical than the average [actor], but I admit it. It is part of my pleasure. I love dancing, I love all my body to play. For me, a role isn't just a face and a voice, and the great actors that I admire are those who use their body to give a shape to their character." By these criteria, surely Lavant himself will long be considered one of the greats.

Mauvais Sang screens at the Cinematheque this Saturday, October 11, at 7 p.m. in our regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall.

Music in Friedkin's Movies : Aint' No Mickey Mouse-ing Going On Here!

Wednesday, October 8th, 2014

Posted byJim Healy

By Jim Healy, Director of Programming

In a terrific interview with Vulture last month, complete flim-maker John Carpenter (whose action masterpiece, Escape from New York will have a Cinematheque/WUD Film screening next month) answers a question about the Ennio Morriconne score for his 1982 remake of The Thing. Carpenter, who typically composes the music for his films, talks about his preference for minimalist music in movies, as opposed to the "Mickey Mouse-ing" of something like Max Steiner's score for King Kong, where, as Carpenter says:

"The footsteps of King Kong are scored: bom-bom-bom. Mickey Mouse–ing is over-scoring. It's what happens today. Everything is over-scored. Minimalist music, a lot of it from my time — '60s, '70s, and '80s. Tangerine Dream did some. The Exorcist's score is another. They weren't Mickey Mouse scores. By Mickey Mouse, I don't mean dumb, or cartoonish, but everything was musically it: footsteps, everything."

Tangerine Dream, of course, got their first offer to score a Hollywood film from director William Friedkin, who invited the German musicians to score his 1977 existentialist action movie, Sorcerer. Friedkin discovered the trio, then made up of Edgar Froese, Christopher Franke, and Peter Baumann, performing their special brand of electronic music at a concert in an abandoned chruch in Germany's Black Forest. Instead of having the band score the film after it was shot and edited, which is what usually happens, Friedkin sent Tangerine Dream the script. Friedkin had them read it and the band recorded their musical impressions which Friedkin used to establish rhythm when assembling the footage with editor Bud Smith. Despite the fact that Sorcerer was rather famously rejected by audiences and most critics when first released, the score proved highly influential and led to steady work for Tangerine Dream in movies, most notably Michael Mann's Thief, Paul Brickman's Risky Business, Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark, and the American release version of Ridley Scott's Legend (which, in its international release version, had a very fine, if slightly MIckey Mouse-y score by Jerry Goldsmith).

You can hear Tangerine Dream's Sorcerer score for yourself this Thursday, October 9, when the UW Cinematheque and WUD Film present a new DCP restoration of Friedkin's riveting adventure. For now, here's a little musical prelude:

Friedkin has always been a director who pays close attention to sound design and music is always a big part of that design. The director brought on experimental jazz musician Don Ellis for The French Connection and, in the 80s, hired pop rockers Wang Chung to write songs and a score for To Live and Die in L.A. (Ben Reiser reflects on that movie music here). Before his biggest box-office hit, 1973's The Exorcist wound up with the eclectic, minimalist score mentioned above by John Carpenter, Friedkin commissioned a score from then in-vogue composer Lalo Schifrin, whose body of work then included the theme for Mission: Impossible and the scores for Bullitt, Dirty Harry and another colossol 1973 hit, Enter the Dragon. While Friedkin found Schifrin's music abstract enough when he first heard it played back on piano, the director was not pleased when the score was recorded by a 70-piece orchestra (at the same Warner Bros. facility where Max Steiner recorded his scores in the 30s, 40s and 50s). According to Friedkin, "[The score] was wall-to-wall noise, using every component of this big band, including electric brass...I was in shock. It's not that the music was badly written or played; but it was the opposite of what I wanted."

Friedkin rather notoriously discarded Schifrin's work, effectively destroying their friendship, and replaced the score with pre-existing cues by Anton Webern, Krzysztof Penderecki, and, of course, Mike Oldfield, whose "Tubular Bells" helped launch Richard Branson's Virgin Records because of its inclusion in The Exorcist. Friedkin's move was not unprecedented in Hollywood history: Stanley Kubrick rejected a score by Alex North for 2001: A Space Odyssey in favor of the now famous pre-existing cues by Johann Strauss and Richard Strauss.

While "Mickey Mouse" scoring continues its dominance (consider Hans Zimmer's overdone music for Disney's production of The Lone Ranger as one example), the kind of minimalist scoring preferred by Carpenter and Friedkin in Sorcerer and The Exorcist has its contemporary descendants, like the music Johnny Greenwood has written for Paul Thomas Anderson's most recent films and the Carpenter-esque scores by Kurt Stenzel for Jodorowsky's Dune and Steve Moore for The Guest.

The Exorcist screens tonight, October 8, at 7 p.m. in the Marquee Theater at Union South. The 2000 re-release version, featuring added footage not seen in the original 1973 release, will be shown. A newly restored DCP of Sorcerer screens Thursday, October 9 at 7 p.m. at the Marquee Theater at Union South. Both screenings are co-presented by Cinematheque and WUD Film and both are free and open to the public.

A bestseller in Europe, the book eventually inspired a 1967 film adaptation by director František Vláčil which has earned comparisons to Tarkovsky by some and has been proclaimed the greatest of all Czech films by a few others. You have the opportunity to see the movie version this Friday, October 10 at 7 p.m. in the Cinematheque's regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall. What makes the screening extra special is the fact that we will be showing the film from a recently struck 35mm print. Opportunities to see new restorations like this one in their original 35mm formats have been greatly diminished since DCP projection has become the standard of most commercial theaters. The new 35mm print of Markéta Lazarová is brought to us courtesy of the good folks at Janus Films, the theatrical releasing arm of the Criterion Collection, who have made Markéta Lazarová available on blu-ray and DVD.

Levitation Test Footage from THE EXORCIST

Monday, October 6th, 2014

Posted byJim Healy

By Ben Reiser

Writer Mike McPadden currently resides in Chicago, where his encyclopedic knowledge of exploitation movies of all types and his winning way with double entendres and sex-based puns had served him well as editor-in-chief of the website, Mr. Skin. These days Mike is doing a ton of freelance writing and has had two books published within the last year. His most recent tome, Heavy Metal Movies is informative and entertaining in exactly the ways I’ve come to expect from McPadden.

For a recent blog post on death and taxes, Mike has compiled a wonderful list of movie clips featuring screen tests and unused alternative early versions from a wide gamut of films that were then famously revised. Included in this list is some super cool levitation test footage from The Exorcist. Check it out:

More to the point, I’ve never seen The Exorcist in a movie theater. Not sure how that happened but I’m gonna fix that this Wednesday night, October 8 at 7 p.m. when the Cinematheque and WUD Film present the 2000 re-release version as part of the Cinematheque's William Friedkin series.